TY - JOUR AU - Klaiber,H. Allen AU - Smith,V. Kerry TI - Evaluating Rubin's Causal Model for Measuring the Capitalization of Environmental Amenities JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 14957 PY - 2009 Y2 - May 2009 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14957 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14957.pdf N1 - Author contact info: H. Allen Klaiber The Ohio State University Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Development Economics 332 Ag Admin Building 2120 Fyffe Rd Columbus, OH 43210 Tel: 614-247-4914 E-Mail: klaiber.16@osu.edu V. Kerry Smith Department of Economics W.P. Carey School of Business P.O. Box 879801 Arizona State University Tempe, AZ 85287-9801 Tel: 480/727-9812 Fax: 480/965-0748 E-Mail: kerry.smith@asu.edu AB - This paper outlines a new framework for gauging the properties of quasi-experimental estimates of the willingness to pay (WTP) for changes in environmental and other non-market amenities. As a rule, quasi-experimental methods cannot offer alternative hypotheses to judge the quality of their quasi random assignments of treatment and control outcomes to economic agents. Their results must be judged by the explanation of the event used to construct the assignment and the counter examples offered as robustness checks for the logic of each application. This paper develops a four-step procedure for situations that rely on housing price capitalization. It is a computational analog to Chetty's [2009] call for considering the measurement objectives as part of evaluating the relevance of reduced versus structural form modeling strategies. Two diverse applications are used to establish the method's relevance for environmental problems. The first examines the value of a conversion of land cover from xeric to wet landscape. The second examines the clean-up of hazardous waste sites. We find that even when quasi-experimental methods have access to statistically ideal instruments their performance in measuring general equilibrium WTP depends on other aspects of each application. ER -